jgrim

Discuss.online is pretty awesome. 🤓

I hosted social.photo, which was a Pixelfed instance.

I had an uptick in users when I started to consider shutting down the site. It was the reason, ultimately, I decided to shut down as soon as possible. The software is awful, and I don’t want to deal with the issues multiplied by growth.

I decided to announce a shutdown by posting and hoping people see it because you can’t make an announcement to users on Pixelfed out of the box. I know there is an admin interface for it, but it doesn’t work.

Afterward, many of my new users told me they came from other instances that shut down.

This trend could be a blip as users create new accounts to migrate as they did before from their previous accounts. I know there is a user interface for this, but it doesn’t work.

Or it could be the terrible spam filter that blocks real users and allows bots. So, real users aren’t there to report bots. This is compounded by an uptick in new hype instances. These are sometimes poorly moderated instances full of bots awaiting returning interest from their owners to get cleaned up or closed.

Or it’s real!

I’m afraid to lookup what “gooning joggers” means.

I run a Pixelfed instance. The code is faaaaaaaarrrrr from polished. Its buggy and the admin interface either doesn’t work or is poorly implemented. I’d rather run and moderate Lemmy than Pixelfed. I have considered just shutting it down several times. I run the instance https://social.photo/.

Artic is incredible

Samesies

Thanks!

I missed the coast guard hearing details. What came out?

Yeah, we also call them communities

It’s a reputable web development language and Spring Framework is very robust. I knew it would make development very quick and easy. Also, everyone learns Java just a little so I feel like it’s easy for the average person to contribute. Rust is certainly fun but Java is tried and true. The organization of the Lemmy project’s code vs Sublinks is night and day. It’s so easy to extend and grow Sublinks.

Great summary!

Easier but not what I thought was needed. We need more choice!

That’s not true, I wrote a blog post about it: https://jasongr.im/blog/why-i-started-sublinks/

I tried that the but API lacked a lot of features that they were too busy to add, like proper pagination to find the latest changes, etc. I started a project like that first called socialcare.cloud but have since shut it down in favor of Sublinks.

Java isn’t my preferred language. I did learn Rust to try to contribute but found the code base in less than ideal state and the process of contributing to risky. They don’t always accept all PRs. I also have low faith in the success of Lemmy due to it’s poor QA process and it’s major lack of features.

I believe Java is the best option for this type of application, I almost did it in PHP. My goal was to attract as many people as possible to want to contribute. It’s worked, I have a ton of people contributing in some way, Sublinks roadmap is clear and organized, and we have a super-motivated and driven team.

We won’t fail.

Hey, I’m the founder of Sublinks. It’s a huge collaboration of several major Lemmy instances like lemmy world, beehaw, discuss.online, programming.dev, and quite a few others that wish not to be named until the release.

Some admins are directly working on the project while others are providing other types of support. @[email protected] is certainly a major contributor and has helped develop the new front end in many major ways. You can follow some progress updates here: [email protected]

We have several different teams of developers:

1. API / Java
2. Front-end / JS/CSS/HTML
3. Federation / GoLang
4. Libraries / JS
5. Requirements gathering and organization
6. Design & Graphics - UI/UX
7. Lemmy to Sublinks migration tools

There is an active community on Matrix where all of us chat: https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks:discuss.online if anyone is interested in joining. We also have weekly touch bases to discuss progress and next steps. There are tons of people contributing.

We are currently taking donations only through Github: https://github.com/sponsors/sublinks if you’re truly interested. We’re all working on this part-time in our free time and making fantastic progress.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Thanks so much! We’re trying hard!

What is an example of a good reason to start a new project?

That’s an over simplified version. For the record, I couldn’t downgrade without data loss.

https://sublinks.org